Mildly Infuriating

Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

So with Spez having a hard on for Elon and how he runs Twitter, how long until we see this on Reddit? Premium members can view 1000 posts/day and regular members can only view 100 posts/day. Similar rule will apply to comments too.

Things like Reddit and Twitter are bad for billionaires. It makes it harder for them to exploit you when there is a public place to talk about their bullshit.

"Extreme levels of data scraping" my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud "look-what-you-made-me-do" scream. And what on earth would "system manipulation" exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.

"To address extreme levels of failing to pay our bills & firing every competent person at Twitter, we've applied the following temporary limits:"

This truly is a genius level move. If users are using your site, they are contributing to your hosting costs. You don’t want that.

It must be nice to be able to waste 44 billion dollars and not miss it.

I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Elon spent.

Elon is so damn transparent. I NEVER remembering anything like this happening before Elon. Dude is running this like a moronic mob boss.

"Hey..it'd be a shame if you could only view 600 tweets. I have this Twitter Blue that might be able to help...."

I gave up on Twitter when this turd took over but holy shit...

Between this and reddit going "down" yesterday, the internet just sucks right now.

It must have taken all of Elon's willpower to not make the limits:

• Verified accounts are limited to reading 6969 posts/day
• Unverified accounts to 420 posts/day
• New unverified accounts to 69/day

That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)

This seems extremely low for all categories. Good for getting people unaddicted though

I think it's important to remember that these companies DID NOT CREATE THIS DATA! They are protecting things that are not theirs.

Almost certainly this isn't anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there's no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.

That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP's of the requests. No need to impact average users.

What's more likely is he hasn't paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.

IMO, that's what you get when you fire half of your staff.

There’s a golden rule: don’t make big changes on an app on Friday because if it fails people are going to have to work during the weekend.

This asshole made the changes on a Saturday

Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i'm optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.

Twitter was great during the big earthquake we had in Japan, because phones weren't working. People sent out tweets for help and got help thanks to twitter.

After this, a lot of municipalites made accounts and now they post emergency info on twitter, but this just fucks everything up.

There are rumors that Twitter is having a dispute with its cloud providers, that is why they need to limit bandwidth.